The app world, mobile world and software world are going through a period of tremendous change and growth, just as they did in the dot-com days a decade ago. And whenever that happens, there’s buzz and noise … and whenever that happens there are buzzwords. As AppCarousel gears up for launch, and as we head to yet another conference next week, we sat down and identified all the great buzzwords in our sector, and there are lots because AppCarousel is into app discovery, app merchandising, app showcasing, and even more techie things like HTML5. So we then decided to have some fun … but first, let’s understand exactly what a buzzword is.

Wikipedia has a page on buzzwords, and they say;

A buzzword (also fashion word and vogue word) is a term of art, salesmanship, politics, or technical jargon that has begun to see use in the wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context

Buzzwords differ from jargon in that jargon is esoteric but precisely defined terminology used for ease of communication between specialists in a given field, whereas a buzzword (which often develops from the appropriation of technical jargon) is often used in a more general way

A-ha! So does that mean that HTML5 is jargon, while the derivative of it, “web apps”, is a buzzword?

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Why people use buzzwords

Wikipedia goes on to explain why people think they are being smart by using buzzwords …

Thought-control via intentional vagueness

To inflate the trivial to something of importance and stature

To camouflage chit-chat saying nothing

When I read those I was LMAO. We have all been in meetings with the buzzword junkie, who reels off one after another, and thanks to Wikipedia we now know why he/she does it!

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Buzzword bingo

Many of you may have heard of buzzword bingo, also known as b***s*** bingo, where you and your colleagues go to a meeting where there is a buzzword junkie and you arm yourselves with a bingo card of all the buzzwords that he/she might say, and the first among you to get a line or a full house shouts out loud “bu**sh**”. This is such a common thing in business these days that Wikipedia have dedicated a page to it, at

Buzzwords are often used by politicians to pad out their speeches, so they are often the subject of bingo games too. Here’s a bingo card that you can play along with at home next time you watch a David Cameron (UK Prime Minister) speech. Click the pic to see the card and one that was actually completed after one of his speeches.

What’s more amusing is that the bingo game was developed by the opposition political party, Labour. How cool is that?!

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AppCarousel bingo

So, that led us to our idea for AppCarousel Bingo, which we will be playing next week at the Open Mobile Summit. Instead of me telling you all about it, click the two images below to see the front and back of the bingo card.

We actually have a list of over 50 buzzwords in our space, but we couldn’t get them all on a card ;-)

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So if you are at my presentation next week at Open Mobile Summit, come and grab a card from us and play along. Please, just don’t shout out “bu**sh**” halfway through my presentation though.

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My challenge

My colleagues said to me last week “Terry, I bet you can’t say a single sentence that has all 16 of those words in it … can you?”

OK, here goes.

AppCarousel addresses the need of the app economy [whoa, app economy is a buzzword and that’s not even on the card!] for better discovery and promotion of apps, including not only Android and Apple apps but web apps,Flash videos, Java apps, and any other type of digital content, whichever app store or website that content might reside in, by selectively curating groups of content for specific types of users then by leveraging the power of personalized targeting of that content, via the rich HTML5 based AppCarousel showcase, resulting in a superior merchandising experience for the brands that care about that content and those users.

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Yahoo! I did it. All 16 buzzwords in once sentence. Hey my AppCarousel spinning team, you owe me a beer at Open Mobile in Frisco next week. Wait, did I really just call it Frisco? Deadly sin committed, as anyone in the Bay Area will tell you. Just as a bit of fun, click the image below to read an Urban Dictionary discussion about the use of the buzzword Frisco, for example it says

2 fugitives hiding out under a bridge in The City got caught by police when asked where are they from and one responded “Frisco”. The cop stated that “no one in The City calls it Frisco”.